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Recommended Reading

Relocated from 1866 New York to Japan by an abusive missionary guardian, young Aurelia Bernard befriends the daughter of Kyoto’s most influential tea master, who accepts her into the family in spite of disapproving conventions and instructs her about the fading tradition of the tea ceremony.

Encountering each other later in life, Elizabeth and Betsy, two women who had known each other since childhood, reflect on the decisions and the men who have shaped their destinies.

A Chinese peasant overcomes the forces of nature and the frailties of human nature to become a wealthy landowner.

A Chinese woman chronicles the struggle of her grandmother, her mother, and herself to survive in a China torn apart by wars, invasions, revolution, and continuing upheaval, from 1907 to the present.

Born to poverty in eighteenth-century London, Mary Saunders’ love of fine clothes and a dream of a better life take her from the world of prostitution to life as a household seamstress in Monmouth to a search for true freedom.

The “memoirs” of one of Japan’s most celebrated geishas describes how, as a little girl in 1929, she is sold into slavery; her efforts to learn the arts of the geisha; the impact of World War II; and her struggle to reinvent herself to win the man she loves.

A first-generation Chinese-American woman recounts growing up in America within a tradition-bound Chinese family, confronted with Chinese ghosts from the past and non-Chinese ghosts of the present.

The saga of five generations of a Mandarin family in China, ranging from the turbulence of war-torn China during the late nineteenth century to the 1970s is revealed through the adventures of Spring Moon, who experiences a long life of trouble, sacrifice, and joy that parallels the twentieth-century history of China.

Follows the lives of three young girls in nineteenth-century China after they pledge never to take on the traditional roles of wives or nuns.

A heart-wrenching but ultimately inspiring memoir recounts the author’s painful childhood as the unwanted daughter of a wealthy yet abusive Chinese family, from which she escaped to the West.

A fictional portrait of the last empress of China follows Orchid, a beautiful teenager from an aristocratic family, who is chosen to become a low-ranking concubine of the emperor and rises to a position of power in the Chinese court.

Documenting the history of her own Chinese-American family, a journalist shares the results of five years of research, including interviews with nearly one hundred Chinese and Caucasian relatives.

At the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two young boys are sent to the country for “reeducation” at a remote mountain village, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translations.

Winnie Louie, an aging Chinese woman convinced that she will die soon, decides to unburden herself by divulging the secrets of those closest to her.

Sent by her family to work in a silk factory just prior to World War II, young Pei grows to womanhood, working fifteen-hour days and sending her pay to the family who abandoned her.

In 1903 China, a restless young Scotswoman enters into an adulterous affair with a Japanese nobleman, beginning an odyssey of scandal that spans two world wars.

In 1958, notified that her husband, a doctor in the Chinese army has been killed in action in Tibet, Shu Wen joins the army, determined to go to Tibet to uncover the truth, only to find herself alone in Tibet, embarking on a thirty-year nomadic odyssey in a novel based on a true story.